Word: kazuichi
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...France, Spain and England. Since 2003 a Spanish publisher, Ponent Mon, in collaboration with a U.K. outfit named Fanfare, has published five books in the U.S. as part of a line they call nouvelle manga. They mean to start a new genre and the latest two, "Doing Time" by Kazuichi Hanawa and "The Walking Man," by Jiro Taniguchi, are two of the most peculiar comix of the year...
...Doing Time" ($20; 240 pages) by Kazuichi Hanawa, also focuses on environmental details, but inside instead of out. As Fanfare/Ponent Mon's most interesting nouvelle manga book, it stands out mostly through the originality of its subject: an autobiography of the author's three years spent in the Japanese prison system. A manga artist who ran afoul of Japan's strict gun laws, Hanawa began serving time in 1995. Far from being a self-righteous polemic about injustice or the cruelty of incarceration, "Doing Time" instead seems to delight in recounting the details of life behind bars...
...remains to be seen whether nouvelle manga will amount to a real movement. It would help if two or more masterworks appeared under such a label. Neither Jiro Taniguchi's "The Walking Man" nor Kazuichi Hanawa's "Doing Time" have quiet enough depth to justify calling them "masterworks." Even so, these Franco-Japanese creations are some of the most unusual, fascinating comix published this year...
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